1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a novel marker for diagnosis of liver cancer capable of efficiently diagnosing and predicting liver cancer, a diagnosis kit, a microarray, a composition for liver cancer diagnosis, and a method for diagnosing liver cancer using the novel marker for diagnosis of liver cancer, and a composition for preventing or treating liver cancer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most common cancer responsible for the 0.5 million deaths every year. The survival rate of the HCC patients has not been improved over the past 20 years and the death rate is almost equivalent to the attack rate. Chronic hepatitis developed by the inflammation with hepatitis B virus (HBV) or hepatitis C virus (HCV) and exposure to cancer-triggering aflaxtoxin B1 are known to be the major risk factor regarding HCC.
Further, there is a report that changes in the cell-cycle regulating substances in the transition to G1 phase in the cell cycle mechanism are associated with the formation of liver cancer. It has also been reported that DNA mutation and the genetic alternation are observed in the liver cancer patient's tissue.
The above indicates that it is not a handful of specific genes that causes the liver cancer to initiate, but rather complicated interaction among many genes involved in intracellular signaling and regulation mechanism which are generated as the malignancy of the cancer progresses. Accordingly, a study would be quite limited if it only focuses on the mechanism of formation of liver cancer based on a few specific genes. Accordingly, it is necessary to discover new genes possibly involved with the liver cancer based on comparative analysis of various genes' expression between normal liver cells and hepatoma cell lines.
Recent studies have reported that genetic alterations of tumor associated genes such as p53, β-catenin, and AXIN1 are involved in hepatocarcinogenesis; however, the frequencies of somatic mutations, in these genes, appear o be very low in patients with HCC. Furthermore, it is unclear how these genetic changes precisely cause the clinical characteristics observed in individual patients with HCC. Therefore, the major molecular events underlying HCC remain to be identified.
Accordingly, a novel marker is necessary, which can analyze a cause of liver cancer with increased accuracy, and predict or diagnose a liver cancer.